Man Says He Tried To Save Fallen Pilot

Wayne Bolin Said Officers Told Him To Back Away From The Crash Site.

April 26, 1998|By Lenny Savino of The Sentinel Staff

KISSIMMEE — Wayne Bolin is frustrated. The former volunteer firefighter and army fire chief said he watched last Sunday's midair collision at the Airshow of the Stars from his porch and tried to rescue one of the pilots. He couldn't.

``I was the first person there and the flames didn't reach one of the pilots yet.'' Bolin said Friday from his home next to the airport. ``He was strapped into the cockpit and I saw one of his arms move. I tried to get to the buckles but couldn't and I didn't have a knife to cut him out.''

Pilots James Edward ``Sonny'' Lovelace, 46, and Randall Drake, 39, members of the Red Baron Stearman Squadron based in Marshall, Minn., died while performing at the Airshow of the Stars at the Kissimmee airport.

The two were part of a four-plane team performing a loop in a diamond formation for a crowd of about 5,000. Lovelace and Drake's planes collided and fell from the sky. Lovelace died on impact, but Drake was still alive.

When police and bystanders arrived at the scene, Bolin, 32, told them he had been trained as a firefighter and that he needed their fire extinguisher and a knife. The police told him to stay back.

Kissimmee police Officers Tom Flacco and Brian Whiddon took over as the flames closed in on Drake, who was still trapped in his Stearman.

``His legs were on fire and Brian kept spraying him with his fire extinguisher while I tried to cut through the two straps,'' Flacco said. Two fire extinguishers and a jug of water that Whiddon kept in the trunk of his police car were needed before the fire was extinguished enough for Flacco to cut the pilot loose.

Flacco would realize later that he also had cut his fingers in the process. Whiddon had to be treated at a local hospital for heat exposure and first-degree burns to his hands.

``The pilot looked normal when we first saw him,'' Flacco said. But when they pulled him out of the cockpit, they discovered he had been badly injured.

Drake died on the way to the hospital, officials said.

Not realizing Drake was in critical condition, Bolin thought he might have saved the pilot if he had gotten help sooner, and if he had been taken more seriously by the officers who ordered him to stay back.

On television he criticized the fire department for not getting there sooner. At a City Commission meeting later in the week, he raised more questions about how the air show was run.

He wanted to know why there weren't more rescue personnel assigned to the show, and why they weren't positioned on both sides of the runway as they are during military air shows. This type of positioning allows rescue crews to have access to more of the airfield, he said.

For example, at last week's Sun 'n Fun EAA Fly-In in Lakeland, as many as 40 workers, plus an ambulance, two firetrucks and a crane were at the airstrip, said Mike Wood, chairman of the event's emergency response team.

Kissimmee Fire Chief John Chapman said he assigned minimum coverage - a fire engine, an ambulance and a foam truck - near the spectator area at the request of the show's organizers, who paid firefighters overtime because it was not a city-run event.

Bolin questioned the 1 minute, 21 second response time the city said it took for rescue units to reach him. He said it was more like 8 to 10 minutes.

``I ran 100 yards, scaled a 6-foot-high chain-link fence, crossed a canal and ran another 200 yards to the crash scene and was there for at least two minutes before anyone reached me,'' he said. ``Their 1:21 response time started from when the call was dispatched, not when it crashed in front of them like it should have.''

After criticism that the city's fire department didn't respond to the crash soon enough, officials met last week and stood by their response time. They also said people may have been confused because other support units were called to the scene as well.

Some defenders of the city's response time to the tragedy also say the pilot couldn't have been saved, no matter how quickly the rescue team had arrived.

Bolin disagrees.

``To sit back and say nobody can survive a crash is playing God,'' he said. ``You have to do everything you can to see if the person survived.''